Lately, there's a great deal of push by folks to move data into clouds. One post i read recently talks about how that's the new business paradigm and how unless we adopt that, we're screwed. i'm not so sure. Well, let me explain myself at least.
i do believe that the future is in distributed architectures and collaboration over "baton" style work (e.g. Pass that document over to me when you're done. i want to add some stuff.) Those are all fantastic ways to make everything miscellaneous and whatever other modern 2.0 term you want to use. Except there's a significant problem. What happens when the cloud goes away?
A lot of folks think that your data is a lot like your money. If you have $40K in some account and the bank fails, you don't lose your money. That's because the FDIC ensures that while the actual assets your money was converted into may be about as worthwhile as the south pole ice machines your bank decided to invest in, you still have cash in pocket you can put into a (hopefully) better managed bank. Still, there are limits. FDIC has a maximum they're willing to cover per investor, and they don't cover every sort of investment that your bank may offer. (e.g. that $200K you had in the bank mutual fund that was paying back 40%? Gone.) Investment banking is a gamble, it's just that the level of risk is low enough that it's not a major concern.
Thing is, "cloud computing" is also a gamble. Your account could go away for any reason. The company hosting the service could go away. The company that the company providing the service depends on could go away. Any number of things can go boom and suddenly you are in the rather frightening position of staring up at a beautiful, cloudless digital sky. What's more, unlike the current Financial systems which have checks and assurances that you and your money are not easily parted without your knowledge and consent, there are NO checks and assurances for your data.
Not yet at least. i mean, just wait until a few major services go off line and the Digital Great Depression hits.
This is absolutely why i consider 'online' storage secondary, and even then, i don't store everything with one provider. i've got redundant data stores on multiple sites to ensure that when (not if) some service goes bye-bye, i'm not hosed.
i do believe that eventually there will be services out there that do provide this level of redundant clouding, most from open source. We've got Jabber which handles IM away from singular sources. We've got OpenAuth to handle account validation and access. What we really need now is a service that lets us do memcache like data fetches to the cloud from trusted, managed sources. (e.g. i remotely request Document.X, the service authenticates, fetches it from my home drive if it's not already in the cache, allows me to share and modify, then writes the changes back to the trusted source.) Figure some bright soul will configure git or subversion to do something like that (if they haven't already).
i like clouds. Really, i do.
i just think they're not the best thing to go building your castle on.
Replace storage (or CPU, as the case may be) with electricity.
How many folks maintain independent power sources?
And more to the point, what's the value/tradeoff of having diesel generators onsite?
Good point mmk. I figure the number of folks with personal generators is probably not that many. In fact, I'm willing to say it's probably less than the number of folks willing to entrust controlling ownership their only copy of sensitive or proprietary information to services that can terminate their user agreements for any reason, and I like to think that population is fairly small.
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JR would you say that you've looked at clouds from both sides now?